The One Marketing Change That Could Help Save Journalism

The survival of journalism and a free press largely depends on all of our willingness to fund it. One overlooked element of this issue is how digital marketing is purchased and valued. Consider this eye-opening assessment of how digital marketing and “brand safety tech” works and why these tools that were designed to prevent ads from appearing beside potentially controversial content based on using broad keywords like “shooting” or “drugs” have indiscriminately also created an impossible standard that dramatically reduces the ability of quality news sites to generate revenue from digital ads too. Here’s how the situation was described in the article:

If a click-through rate is your idea of a successful outcome, and your click-through rate is 0.09%, then you have to buy millions and millions of impressions to make it work. The only way to satisfy that need is to spread the ad far and wide, where brand safety technology becomes essential to protect you from the worst of the internet. We’re calling on everyone in the industry to … either scale back their use of brand safety technology on quality publishers or just turn it off completely.

This is a clever solution that deserves more consideration. Why should mainstream news media sites employing trained journalists be algorithmically limited by the same standards that are created for less scrupulous websites? Why not have a "whitelist" equivalent in digital advertising where a specific number of websites are deemed safe and therefore not subject to being run through these brand safety tech filters? Any solution that can bring more ad revenue to support quality journalism deserves to be considered and advocated for. What do you think? Could this help bring more revenue to quality news sites?